Take from the poor to give to the rich... that's New Labour's super-casino plan

In 2004, before her Italian connection became an embarrassment, Tessa Jowell dismissed opponents of New Labour's plans to let gambling rip as modern aristocrats determined to stifle the masses' pleasures. 'There's a whiff of snobbery in some of the opposition to new casinos,' she told the Telegraph. Her critics wanted to keep casinos as 'the preserve of the rich' and turn away 'the big investment that will come from the United States'.

Unlike the snobs, she cared about poverty and was determined to use casino money to regenerate the slums. Top of the government's list was Blackpool, a resort whose dearest friends have to admit is sorely in need of a stroke of good fortune. Package holidays and cheap flights hit it as hard as cheap clothing imports hit the Lancashire mill towns that once supplied its tourists.

Unemployment, long-term sickness, failing schools and crime have followed and left Blackpool a wretched place. Seaside towns have always been melancholy places out of season; Blackpool can depress you in high summer.

The attraction of using gambling to turn it into the Las Vegas of the north west is obvious and virtually every press report says that Blackpool is the front runner in the race to host the pilot project for super-casinos. Given what it has been through, you would need to be a flint-hearted moralist to say it shouldn't have the chance to make money.

Yet, to date, it is far from clear if the casino will give money to Blackpool or Blackpool give money to the casino. A study by the Hall Aitken consultancy predicted that a super-casino would merely take jobs from rival tourist attractions. What jobs it created would probably go to east Europeans.

This seems a poor recompense for the public money Blackpool has staked already. Steven Bate, a Liberal Democrat councillor, and one of the few in the local political establishment who believes Blackpool is prostituting itself, has kept a record of the corporate welfare the council is offering. It is promising to compulsorily purchase the land for the casino, which is currently occupied by the police station and law courts.

In a sign of the times, the council will agree to demolish public buildings that once embodied law and order to clear the ground for a gambling den and then spend public money on new homes for the police and judges. It gets better. The council already has spent public money on designing the new casino and finding a developer to put it up.

In the age of globalisation, we've seen governments offer tax breaks and other sweeteners to entice multinationals to move to their countries, but I've never heard of public money being used to give casino capitalists a casino.

The reason why Blackpool has to pay out gets to the heart of the delusion behind New Labour's thinking. It's not the scale of the poverty that puts the casino operators off the town, but that Blackpool's poverty is not great enough. A report for John Prescott's office, released last week, said the super-casino operators wanted to be in city centres, and you can see why. Each hopes to lure about one million people a year to play on the 2,000 or so fruit machines.

The infinitesimally small chance of winning the £1m jackpots Jowell is allowing them to offer are meant to keep the punters pumping in the pound coins. Blackpool, like most seaside towns, is too far from the big centres of population to provide enough poor, addicted, desperate or foolish gamblers to allow the casinos to operate seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

What they need are punters who can jump on a bus on a winter weekday, not holidaymakers who disappear in September. Las Vegas is the exception to the norm. Across the world, most money is taken by casinos that are close to their customers.

With a frankness which is unusual for management consultants, Prescott's advisers warned that New Labour was offering casinos a 'licence to print money' and risked bringing more 'crime and antisocial behaviour' to city centres. The experience of Australia and the United States shows that they are right. There are hundreds of studies to back them up. One of the most comprehensive was by Professor Earl L Grinols from the University of Illinois, who worked out that super-casinos rely on addicts for between a third and a half of their revenues.

If you believe that people should be free to spend their money how they choose, then you will doubtless shrug your shoulders and say these prices are worth paying.

Still, even the most committed libertarian should retain a sense of the ironies of political history and marvel at the spectacle of the Labour party encouraging the poor to redistribute what wealth they have to the rich.

An Italian lesson we shouldn't learn The police objected to Tessa Jowell's casinos because they feared their roulette tables would be a money launderer's dream. A drug dealer could convert his wads of notes into chips, put half on black and half on red then convert the chips back into clean money.

The 'loans' to New Labour and the Conservatives from the super-rich go through a more upmarket, legal, laundry than a casino, but the effect is the same and unpleasant stains are washed away. Because big 'lenders' can remain anonymous, the 'loans' escape unwelcome media attention. If, as so often happens, they are nominated for a peerage, the Lords Appointments Commission need not know about the financial connection, either. And if, as also happens, the ennobled 'lender' says months later that he doesn't want his money back, well, there may be a small fuss in the press, but it will be too late to make a difference.

Westminster journalists see the Brown-Blair rivalry behind everything that moves in the Labour party. They, therefore, explained away Jack Dromey's rather magnificent outburst against the corruption of his party as a Brownite attack on Blair. Maybe I'm being naïve, but it is just possible that the Labour treasurer is a reasonably decent man who was genuinely shocked that peerages were for sale. Perhaps he sincerely thought that property developers and stockbrokers did not have the best interests of the centre-left at heart, and his anger at £14m in soft money sloshing around without his knowledge was real.

What I do know is that other reasonably decent people, who couldn't give a fig about the Brownite-Blairite rivalry, hate the Italianisation of British politics and will refuse to lend Labour their votes.

Let your voice be heard Next Saturday at 2pm in Trafalgar Square, there will be a rally for freedom of expression. I think it's fair to say that previous generations would be astonished that their descendants would have to take to the streets to demand such a basic right, but after the death threats against cartoonists, it seems we do.

Fortunately, the British National Party is nowhere to be seen and the rally will be filled with democratic leftists, Liberal Democrats, secularists and Iranian and Saudi Arabian dissidents.

With the white far right out of the picture, the brown far right has barged in and Islamic fundamentalists are proposing to hold demonstrations against free speech away from central London. So, if you want to protest on Saturday, you have a choice: for free speech or against? Come on, it's not that hard a choice. All will be welcome in Trafalgar Square. Dress? Danish.